Cucumber is all the rage these days, but many developers struggle to
understand how and when to use it. It is designed to be an Acceptance
Testing tool in the context of BDD, but that explanation tends to
bring up even more questions.
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I find myself living in two worlds these days. On one hand, I'm a web programmer building centralized applications mostly with Rails. On the other hand, I'm an iPhone/iPad developer creating mobile applications. My mobile apps live in my pocket and on my tablet; my web apps live on the 'net and in the cloud.
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Many tenets of agile development have been present in the Rails
ecosystem from the beginning. There has been a evolution of practices
stemming from Lean principles in the software world, especially in the
realm of startups. This tutorial will focus on these techniques and
approaches and how they can be applied to the Rails stack to make your
development more focused and efficient.
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This workshop will tour through a number of advanced, in-depth topics on Rails 3. We'll look take a tour of many of the new additions to Rails 3, talk about how to exploit Rails' new focus on Rack to your advantage, dig around in the source to really understand how many of the pieces work, and take a look at how to bring some common, advanced patterns used in Rails 2.x into the world of Rails 3.
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Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't
produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost.
Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all.
That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for
methods that work.
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"Don't repeat yourself." "Don't reinvent the wheel." Phrases like this are thrown around like crazy in the programming world, but one is missing. Repeat others. The best way to learn is to imitate those that are better than us.
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As Rails becomes more mainstream, businesses are now taking a second look at Rails for their e-commerce needs. Join our panel of experts as we discuss a range of possible solutions. We will discuss the merits of using an existing Framework (Spree), using third party services (Shopify and Spreedly) or building your own (Gilt.)
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Over the last 5 years, Rails apps have increased in size, complexity, and value provided to businesses. A few years back all we had to do was customize some generated code and sprinkle on a bit of AJAX, and the rapid pace of development meant that we could launch products and add features way faster than our competitors could.
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We'd mastered it all: join tables, polymorphic associations, nested sets, all neatly normalized. Then we awoke to the haze of NoSQL, where the data-modeling rules had changed. This presentation attempts to correct that by exploring document-oriented modeling with MongoDB. We'll cover common design patterns and contrast strategies for modeling product data in an RDBMS and a document store.
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Most people think that freedom engenders creativity, but the opposite is true. But too much constraint makes it hard to get stuff done. It turns out that you need just enough constraint, and figuring out what gives you that perfect level is harder than you think. This keynote investigates the relationship between creativity and constraint as it applies to software development in the modern world.
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Engine Yard was founded to help deploy, manage and scale Ruby and Rails applications. We built our company with a focus on supporting and cultivating the Ruby and Rails community and ecosystem. Join us as we walk through some open source work we've dedicated our time to, including Rails, Ruby, Rubinius and JRuby. We'll also discuss community efforts we're excited to be involved with.
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Hashrocket recently built and deployed a massive patient record system for a pharmaceutical company in less than six months. We discuss how we dramatically accelerated our normal Rails application development using MongoDB and applying the philosphies of "less SQL".
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Redis is fast. Rails is good. Resque is cheap. It's a match made in heaven.
Learn how to use Resque with Rails, how GitHub processes background jobs, and why Redis makes it blissful.
We'll compare Resque to other solutions, discuss design patterns, and review the plugins that add infrastructure.
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EventMachine is an implementation of the Reactor pattern for Ruby, similar to Python's Twisted. It provides event-driven I/O for MRI, YARV, Rubinius and JRuby, allowing a simple Ruby application to serve thousands of network connections concurrently.
This talk will cover the basics of EventMachine, with an emphasis on the common stumbling blocks encountered by new users
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Views are still the wild west of the web application area. A sea of DIV after DIV with tables tossed in for non-tabular data creates a sea of messy code that hurts the product both in performance and bandwidth. We'll look at the common pitfalls of view code, how to refactor that code into lean, semantic HTML, CSS and presnters that is not only pretty, but also correct and proper.
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What started out as regression tests for the scenarios contained in a book has turned out to be an invaluable tool for reducing regressions in Rails itself and verifying that Rails runs on new versions of Ruby. The results of this work may be of use to others that wish to document scenarios involving Rails and/or system testing their own applications.
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Tools like Cucumber encourage driving new pieces of functionality through tests which cut through the entire Rails web stack, including the database. As a consequence these Acceptance tests can be quite slow. This leaves us in a dichotomy, you want to keep adding new features to your product and you want to maintain rapid test feedback. Somethings got to give. So how do we scale Acceptance tests?
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Mapping CRUD operations to friendly URLs is hardly the end of the story around Restful. We came a long way since Roy Fielding seminal dissertation on REST. Inspired by Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson upcoming book on REST, Hypermedia and HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State), we came down to the "Restfulie" gem.
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Up till now, computer hardware technology has been advancing by orders of magnitude every year; has software technology been keeping up? Now that headlong advance of hardware shows signs of slowing. Moore's law may be dead. Does that mean that software technology will have to pick up the slack? Can it? Is Ruby/Rails a hint of the future solution? If not, what is?
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From friend suggestions in Facebook to product recommendations on Amazon the industry is moving to more intelligent systems. We'll discuss how to discover the relationships in your app and start personalizing the experience of your users. We'll discuss different design approaches to recommendations and how to leverage various libraries in novel ways in your rails application.
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ActiveRelation and ActiveModel bring a lot of interesting features to
Rails 3. These new libraries make it easier to write complex queries
and to extend Rails to work with non-ActiveRecord objects. Learn to
use ActiveRelation and ActiveModel to clean up your code. See how you
can use ARel and AMo to build your own data layer or to connect to new
datastores.
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User behavior tracking can be difficult. If done properly, it can be invaluable in helping to shape the evolution of your product. Done poorly, and it can lead to expensive mistakes. Learn the tools and techniques that will help you make the right choices.
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In this presentation we'll share our insights into how to develop agile, robust, industrial strength code reliably and repeatably, through the application of our own flavor of XP-style agile development. We've been doing Agile for over 10 years, and Rails for over 4. We've delivered over 80 Rails apps to customers, and have learned a thing or two about how to do that sustainably and well.
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